Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 22:22:34 +0200
From: Michael Eldred <artefact-AT-t-online.de>
Subject: Re: Self-showing of hiddenness


Cologne 04-Sep-2001

 Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl> schrieb Tue, 02 Oct 2001 18:06:08
+0200:


> Michael Eldred wrote:
>
> ... we initially don't know (as Rene cites) whether we're going in or out.
>
> Michael,
>
> 1. It's not that we don't know whether we're going in or out.
>     It's, that in the fundamental mood of wonder (Grundstimmung
>     des Erstaunens) one doesn't know out, and one doesn't know in.
>
> 2. This position is not a transitory phase. On the contrary.
>     GA45 leads to this Grundstimmung of Erstaunen,
>     as do the Contributions to Verhaltenheit (restraint)
>     A mood can never be fully understood, even less be
>     jumped over. (That would be Hegel: from dark to light;
>     Heidegger goes from light to dark)
>
> 3. Therefore any speaking about the Grundstimmung is forbidden.
>    (GA45, p. 2). Bringing in the few, midwives of historical births etc.,
>    is completely out of place here, to put it mildly.
>
> 4. Heidegger says in the Contributions, that philosophical
>     notions, without Grundstimmung, are merely clatter.
>     So, also the preparation for the entrance into fundamental
>     mood, must be linked to it. The only possible linkage from
>     outside seems to me: the missing of it, that is: experiencing
>     the need (Not).
>
> 5. This is not possible without Nietzsche. (p. 126)
>     And p. 136:
>
>     [...] only when we ride out the work of Nietzsche,
>     instead of circumventing it, only then is our questioning on its
>     pointed-at track (Bahn), only then do we understand the reflection
>     (Besinnung) upon the first beginning, and also upon that, which
>     didn't happen in it.
>

> Nietzsche's nihilism: everything is nothing.
>
> Without this,  the fundamental mood of wonder, which is the
> mood of the first beginning: the Greeks, but now and here
> to be begun again, is impossible.
>
> Because Nietzsche's 'everything is nothing'  is the essential end of
> the first beginning. Only through this full end (Vollendung), another
> beginning is possible. Would the 1st beginning not be ended in this
> real, full sense, it would go on. Heidegger would have written BT
> and taken Hegel as the last end, as he did. Everything would be
> reasonable then. But then what? The homo rationalis knows too much
> to be able to enter fundamental mood.
>
> (imagine e.g. that philosophy would have stopped with the Rococo.
> Kantian modesty, growing sophistication, china-isation perhaps.
> But an epoch in the Western history ends, and asks for the
> 'creation' of a new one. In this sense 'ending' is not at all
> something fatal, but necessary. Nietzsche knew this.)
>
> So Heidegger had to discover Nietzsche. He knew of him by Rickert,
> I believe, but as a representant of irrational life philosophy. That's
> why Heidegger is so sharp against all Nietzsche interpretations:
> they almost eliminated him.
> They could not really. First, because according to Heidegger a real
> thinker, poet, artist, remain, even when they are forgotten.
> It can never be simply over with them. (H's new past: Ge-Wesen)
> Second, because Heidegger himself dis-covered nihilism phenomenologically:
> the total ruinancy (Ruinanz) in the early writings, and the end of BT.
>
> In the ending of Nietzsche, the first beginning remains. Through its
> absence in the dust-circle it WORKS, presses harder. This pressure
> is to be experienced in the not-knowing-out-and-in.
>
> rene
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------
> drs. Ren de Bakker
> Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
> Afdeling Catalogisering
> tel. 020-5252368
>
>

Rene,

Thanks for this and your earlier post from 01-Oct.

I follow what you say (I know you hate that).
Your Nietzsche is Heidegger's Nietzsche.

You say that for Nietzsche, "everything is nothing", but it really should be
said as everything is worth nothing, i.e. everything is of no value since the
supreme values have been devalued. And where did everything derive its value
from in the long metaphysical tradition? From some kind of transcendence
understood as some kind of Hinterwelt, a world behind the world somehow
dependent on a supreme being.

But there is value in the world itself. This is what Nietzsche saw and he
asserted an affirmation of life. There is an implicit phenomenological ground
for this in everyday life in the world in that Dasein (being-out-there in the
world) values the things of daily life. Things, in their being, are
good-for..., they are good for this or that as enabling a possibility of
Dasein's mortal existence. Heidegger saw that in SuZ.

In another way, Marx saw that there was value in everyday life. Dasein's
entire economic existence, its 'householding' is concerned with valuable
things, ranging from very valuable things to worthless things (worthlessness
is the negation of value and thus still situated in the dimension of
valuableness).

In Marx there is therefore a radical turning away from transcendental values
to values in the world. This has been called materialism and has been
associated with the real-existing socialist/communist countries with their
'atheist' regimes. Such materialism is practised nihilism in denying
transcendental values.

And this is where Heidegger comes in: he discovered transcendence closer to
home in that which is closest to us and which is almost the most hackneyed:
there could be no value, no beings being good-for... without a transcendence,
a 'climbing over' (Ueberstieg) to the world, which is nothing other than the
openness of being. The world opens to and for Dasein in it being open to world
in its understanding and mood, including fundamental moods. In fundamental
moods such as Angst, boredom, amazement (enwonderment) or composure
(Verhaltenheit, not restraint), the opening of the world as such can be
experienced if we _think_ about it. In such thinking there is the possibility
of seeing phenomenologically the opening of world itself, the granting of
beyng itself. Not just that beings as such are granted, but that the openness
of world itself is granted.

In that which is closest to us lies what is most valuable. No need to climb
over to Hinterwelten, to worlds behind the world as it is still practised
today in the attempt to overcome the nihilism of mere 'materialist values'.

That is why it is important to think about value in everyday life, in the
mundane details and simplicity of going about our daily business. When Marx
thinks the essence of capitalism as the movement of self-augmenting value,
this calls on us today to think about what this value-augmentation (which
includes also annihilation of value as its negation) has to do with beyng.
This includes thinking through what the phenomenon of dealing in values on
markets of all kinds signifies. How do things, ranging from screws and apples
through to money capital and stocks and stock options come to have value? What
does it mean that all these things have a price? What is price as a mode of
being? Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger took up such questions, so it is no use
just following faithfully in their footsteps..

Michael
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